Operating systems

Pkviz is a tool for plotting and cycling through and animating a series of network packets captured by tcpdump. What makes it unique is that the packets’ structure is visualized, not any labels and not time itself. Pkviz takes each byte in a packet and plots it out end-to-end, left-to-right, from the first byte to the last. How high the dot gets plotted depends on the value of the byte: bytes with a value of 0 are at the bottom and those which are 255 (0xff) – the maximum value of a byte – get plotted at the top. This might not be interesting for one packet, but that changes when you start looking at thousands of packets. Pkviz can cycle through thousands of packets in the set so you can see what happened on the wire.

Packet Dump Decode (pdd) is a simple, convenient GUI wrapper around the Wireshark/Ethereal tools to convert packet hexdumps into XML containing the decoded protocols and protocol contents. Using pdd, you just need to copy-paste the hexdump into pdd and hit the "Decode" button.